It might have been the unsaid mission statement for quite some time, but now top executive Shin Jong-kyun has puts his cards on the table, telling analysts that after overtaking Apple in smartphones, Samsung aims to be the world leader in tablet computers, too.

Shin noted that Samsung tablet sales will exceed 40 million units this year — more than doubling the sales in 2012.

“Samsung tablet shipments started to grow remarkably since the second half of last year,” he said.

Apple has confirmed it will seek to add Samsung’s new Galaxy S4 to its ongoing patent-infringement lawsuit against the Korean electronics giant.

In a statement filed in the U.S. District Court in California on Monday, Apple said it has analyzed the Galaxy S4 and “concluded that it is an infringing device and accordingly intends to move for leave to add the Galaxy S4 as an infringing product.”

Although you probably wouldn’t usually call it a PC, the iPad is a personal computer. And it’s currently dominating the PC market. During the fourth quarter of 2012, every one in six PCs sold was an iPad, according to research firm Canalys. When you include the Mac as well, more than a third of worldwide PC shipments during the holiday quarter were from Apple.

Samsung vice president JK Shin has confirmed that the company will be announcing the Galaxy Note 8.0 at Mobile World Congress next month, but you don’t need to wait until then to see what it’ll look like. Thanks to these pictures of the device out in the wild, we can see that the iPad mini competitor looks a lot like a giant Galaxy S III, with a traditional button setup that’s unlike other Galaxy tablets.

A Dutch court has today ruled that a number of Samsung’s Galaxy Tab tablets do not infringe Apple designs. The court cited a previous decision made by a High Court in the United Kingdom back in October 2012, which ruled Samsung’s devices are “not as cool” because they lacked the “extreme simplicity which is possessed by the Apple design.”

Korean electronics giant Samsung has today announced that it will drop its patent-infringement lawsuits against Apple in Germany, France, Italy, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom. The announcement comes just hours after Apple was denied its request to have 26 Samsung devices banned in the United States — though the two cases are unrelated.

One of my favorite lines used by people defending Samsung during their $1 billion legal beatdown from Apple was the claim that Apple doesn’t have a patent on glass rectangles with rounded corners. “You can’t patent the rectangle,” they would say.

Yeah, well Apple just did. Kind of.

After a review by a patent examiner on Tuesday, the United States Patent and Trademark Office awarded Apple an additional design patent for the iPad’s “ornamental design.” The design feature cited in US Patent D607,286 for a “Portable display device” pretty much appears to be a literal rounded rectangle.

Apple’s statement regarding its battle against the Samsung Galaxy Tab in the United Kingdom has begun to appear in British newspapers today. You’ll have to search carefully if you want to find it, however. Like the statement the company made on its website earlier this month, this one appears without any Apple branding, and with a dull Arial font that attempts to disappear into the background.